Tabloid
Wars: The Mass Media, Public Opinion, and the Decision to Use Force Abroad

Chapter 1: Introduction and Overview

In recent years, the predominant views concerning the mass media
and public opinion have undergone substantial revision. Where citizens were
once viewed as "empty headed" or "muddle headed" or both, recent scholarship
has found evidence that citizens are capable of making reasoned judgments
about public policy, based on informational shortcuts, or heuristic cues.
At the same time, media and public opinion scholars have demonstrated that
the mass media influences public opinion in important ways, through priming,
framing and agenda setting, and that public opinion, at least sometimes,
influences policy outcomes.

Yet, one assumption underlying these arguments appears not to
have faced comparable scrutiny. While our understanding of the media and
public opinion has evolved, with few exceptions, the scholarly literature
generally assumes that the underlying relationship between the two has remained
static; this in spite of a well-documented "information revolution" in the
mass media. In fact, recent empirical studies have concluded that the typical
American's level of factual knowledge about politics has remained largely
unchanged over the past half century. This implies that the information revolution
has largely failed to affect either the nature or extent of the media's influence
on typical individuals.

Indeed, no theory adequately explains how changes in the media
might alter public perceptions of foreign policy, or how public opinion influences
policy decision-making. Have modern media technologies and practices affected
Americans' fascination with and tolerance for war? And will their reactions
reduce the willingness of America's leaders to employ military force as a
policy tool in the future? These are the primary questions this dissertation
ultimately seeks to answer.

I develop a theory suggesting that the mass media and the mass
public have in fact evolved over the past half-century. I argue that modern
communications technologies and niche-oriented television programming strategies
have produced a substantial increase in public attentiveness to foreign policy
crises. I define attentiveness as the extent to which typical individuals,
and by extension the mass public, are cognizant of, and willing to accept
information about, a given political issue. I test the theory through a series
of statistical analyses, both time-series and cross-sectional, as well as
through content analyses of media coverage of a series of U.S. foreign crises.
I find that the American public is indeed growing increasingly attentive
to foreign policy crises.

I further argue that an attentive public can constrain presidents
from escalating foreign crises, particularly when the strategic stakes involved
are relatively modest. To extend the theory and derive testable hypotheses,
I develop a formal model of crisis escalation. The crisis escalation game
also facilitates a more rigorous anlysis of the conditions under which public
opinion will impact presidential decisionmaking in foreign crisis situations,
as well as the nature and extent of such influence. I test the hypotheses
derived from the model against two data sets, each of which contains information
on all U.S. foreign crisis since World War II, as well as through a detailed
case study of the 1992-94 U.S. humanitarian intervention in Somalia. I find
that, when the strategic stakes are low, an attentive public can indeed inhibit
presidents from escalating foreign crises.